XMLifying my site, take 5: Really Simple Discoverability (RSD) is “a way to help client software find the services needed to read, edit, or “work with” weblogging software….The goal is simple. To reduce the information required to UserName, Password, and homepage URL.”
The RFC was made by Daniel Berlinger less than two months ago, and already meets support from a number of blogging tools (first Archipelago, for which it was designed, then Radio, and then Ben Hammersley brought it to Movable Type).
As I understand from reading various blogs, RSD does for blogs what WSIL does for web services in general. WSIL, or WS-Inspection, is one of the (several) parts of the web services technology stack. Timothy Appnel has an excellent introduction to WSIL. He writes:
“While similar in scope to the Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification, WSIL is a complementary, rather than a competitive, model to service discovery…
WSIL documents are located using a few simple conventions using existing Web infrastructure. In many ways, WSIL is like a business card — it represents a specific entity, its services, and contact info, and is typically delivered directly by whom it represents.”
So, why RSD? I think the answer may be, that it is built for purpose and immediate implementation, just like RSS was. So, let’s give it a chance. It will be easy to migrate to WSIL, if that will be necessary, but for now, the developers seem to be doing wonders with stuff like RSD and RSS. I don’t know how many WSIL-files there are out there already. Not a lot, I think, and my prediction for 2003 is that we’ll see far more RSD-files than WSIL-files.
Read Sam Ruby‘s comments, and all the comments to the comments for more information on RSD.
So, Slashdemocracy Blogging Networks now supports auto-discóvery of the RSD. Besides being yet another XML-file here, which is good to the extend I measure value by numbers, I have no real use for the file. Yet.
